Informal Learning in Online Social Network Environments: An Evidence from an Academic Community on Facebook

This work aims at deepening the informal learning patterns of conference participants in Online Social Network (OSN) communities. In particular, this study considers the interactions within a Facebook community triggered in the last 40 days by academic organizers in order to nurture a favorable context around an upcoming academic conference. This paper proposes a novel methodology together with the first application of its kind to the academic event context in order to provide tools and techniques for conference hot topics prediction and professional sub-networks identification.